On Sunday, HBO premiered season two of Treme with an episode called “Accentuate the Positive.” It is a fitting title as it has been getting positive reviews. Season two picks up seven months after season one left off.
According to screenrant.com, “the myriad plotlines that drove the first season will still be present, but [writer David] Simon intends to fortify those rich, character-driven elements by placing them against the backdrop of the larger problems facing the distressed city and its people. Much of season two intends to focus on the issue of crime, and how it took the aftermath of Katrina from bad to worse.”
One of the few quirks about the show is that it doesn’t exactly have a plot per say. Buzzfocus.com says, “Treme isn’t about plot, in the traditional sense. There was barely any of it in the first season and in the second season premiere, ‘Accentuate the Positive’, there isn’t that much of it either. Instead, we get a peek into what everyone is doing fourteen months after Hurricane Katrina.”
Rather than plot, the characters drive the story. Cleveland.com, along with stating that season two is better than the first, says, “There are no easy answers in the Big Easy, but this is what [David] Simon and [Eric] Overmyer do so effectively. They build a complex, multilayered portrait of a broken city, person by person.”
Entertainment Weekly commends Treme for being weirder than its HBO counterparts, but “in a good way”: “That paradoxical thinking pops up everywhere on Treme. The show loves its city, but it’s not shy about exposing the corruption that was present in New Orleans long before Katrina arrived. No other movie or TV show has ever made New Orleans look better. No other movie or TV show has ever made New Orleans look worse… Treme and Game of Thrones aren’t really all that different: They’re both about the battle for power, and how average people get swept up in the tidal waves of history. But only one of them comes with a trombone section.”
Nearly all the critics agree that “Accentuate the Positive” shows how fierce and honest Treme is. Seattle Pi sums it up very well by calling it “powerful entertainment,” a phrase that fits both the show and the gifts from the city it portrays.
–Barbie Cure
